[ILUG] Mac's and Wintel and Linux....

[Justin Mason]

John McDonnell said:

> > What about if I update the macs to MacOs X? Does it look the same to the
> > users, and can they run existing apps? 
> 
> Mac OS X is still in Beta. It will be released to users in March. The
> public beta is decent enough but still only that.  The UI is quite
> different... it's been updated to be all sparkly and translucent and
> anti-aliased... 

(some "as far as I know" comments here. I haven't used it extensively, or
older MacOS since about System 6.x, but from what I've heard, this is the
story...)

It's very nice alright -- but it's a totally new departure from the old
interface, so existing Mac users will hate you if you make them upgrade.

Give it a while though and hopefully a few apps will come out that provide
the "essential" features the old Mac fans need. ;)

> Current Mac OS apps will run in Classic mode.. unless they use that Carbon
> API, in which case, they'll run natively on Mac OS X.

The Carbon API is the way to do it for MacOS X clients; the Classic mode
doesn't fit in fully.

To use a Win32 parallel,  it's like running an X server on a Win32 desktop
in "multiple-windows" mode (where Windows acts as the window manager).
Your X apps appear like normal Windows apps; they're all on the same
desktop; but the UNIX apps appear entirely different and use different
semantics, so it's not seamless by any stretch of the imagination.

> Anyway, we use a combo of atalkd and samba here and it works quite well.

With MacOS X you could probably just use NFS -- it really is BSD UNIX in
there!  *That's* the killer feature -- proper, heterogenous network
support.

--j.